The departed: Nike's IT chief and top Nike contractor worked at Barclays, but both now gone

Former Nike chief information officer Anthony Watson worked with Shaygan Kheradpir, the former chief executive of Juniper Networks, at Barclays Bank PLC. Juniper in August announced a partnership with Nike. Kheradpir resigned from Juniper in November. Watson resigned last week.

(Allan Brettman / The Oregonian)

Former Nike chief information officer Anthony Watson had an important reunion this year.

Watson, who resigned his position last week, reunited with former colleague Shaygan Kheradpir when Juniper Networks announced it had formed a partnership with the Oregon sports footwear and apparel giant. Kheradpir was chief executive of Juniper.

The alliance between Watson's and Kheradpir's former companies is expected to be transformational. Watson said so himself this summer during a visit with Juniper employees at the company's Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters. At that same appearance, he said Nike needed "to start believing we're more of a technology company than we are a footwear and apparel company."

But just four months later, Watson and Kheradpir have left their companies, each having resigned. Both – who had been colleagues previously at Barclays Bank, PLC -- had worked in their new roles for less than a year.

The departures – occurring within a month of each other -- add another odd wrinkle to Watson's announcement last week that he was leaving Nike.

In any case, within a day of his resignation, Watson was gone – his office in a Nike-leased building on the Tektronix campus cleared of his possessions. Prior to Barclays, Watson was senior vice president and global head of technology services for Wells Fargo, where he also served as Wells Fargo Bank International board member. He has also held senior roles at CitiGroup, Unisys Corporation, Microsoft and First-e Bancorp, Europe's first internet bank.

Kheradpir began at Juniper, a networking-gear maker, in January. He arrived from Barclays, where he served as the chief operations and technology officer, and as a member of its executive committee. Prior to joining Barclays, he was executive vice president and chief information and technology officer at Verizon Communications.

On Nov. 10, Juniper announced Kheradpir, 53, was resigning after a board review of his conduct in a negotiation with a customer. Board members and Kheradpir have "different perspectives regarding these matters," Juniper said in a statement without identifying the customer.

Juniper has had other recent trouble, acknowledging in August 2013 -- months before Kheradpir was hired -- that the U.S. government is investigating whether the company paid bribes to foreign officials.

Spokespeople for Juniper and Nike did not respond to questions about Kheradpir and Watson. Nike spokesman Greg Rossiter did say in an email that the company was proceeding on implementing a five-year information technology plan whose creation has been credited to Watson and that the partnership between Nike and Juniper announced in August would stay in place.

About 200 Juniper employees got a glimpse of the rapport between Kheradpir and Watson on Oct. 24 when the Nike executive appeared for about 20 minutes at a panel-style talk.

Watson seized the platform to explain his vision for the Nike-Juniper partnership as well as Nike's overall future.

"Nike brought me in to fundamentally transform how we look at technology across its entire complex ecosystem, because we're not just one type of company," Watson said in a recording obtained by The Oregonian. "We're a manufacturer, we're a retailer, a physical retailer, a dotcom, etcetera.

"And I shared this with some people earlier – it's taken Nike 42 years to get to where it is today. We want to do the same again in five years. And that's a radical transformation, certainly, on our journey. So that's the main reason I was brought in to Nike."

After crediting Kheradpir for "everything I learned about innovation" during their days at Barclays, Watson went on to say:

"Fundamentally, Nike needs to change its complete paradigm of having engaged this technology and leveraging its technology to drive its business into the future, specifically, for example, around dotcom and also the complex ecosystem we operate in China, for example.

"We've got 8,000 stores just in China. So we've got a massively complex ecosystem -- 740 factories around the world manufacturing product for Nike, a large marketing arm as well, so it's quite a complex ecosystem, arguably as complex as a bank."

And the audience, assembled in an outdoor structure -- the Juniper Aspiration Dome on the Juniper campus -- applauded after Watson said: "The thing that keeps me up at night – I was asked this question earlier -- how do we enable the growth of Nike while it's transforming? That's why we selected Juniper as one of the key partners on that journey."

In a question and answer portion of the talk, Watson described his guiding principles for change at Nike.

"What we're building out at Nike at the moment is called Innovation Fridays, where we let people just go off and look at how they can enable value for Nike. And we've put dollars aside, nearly $5 million, to invest in key initiatives we think will add value for the company."

Another questioner asked Watson where he thought Nike was headed.

"Well, first of all I think Nike's best days are ahead of it," he said. "We are the market leader by a clear blue sea in our industry. The tipping (point) for Nike is we've got to start believing we're more of a technology company than we are a footwear and apparel company. And we're going on that journey, as an organization."

Watson's answer could have been related to other remarks he made about the inevitable growth of data-gathering apparel and footwear, something he expected Nike and its competitors to be offering in even greater quantities in the near future.

And, while he acknowledged that Apple chief executive Tim Cook sits on the Nike board, Watson said he did not think much of the computer company's Apple Pay, agreeing with Kheradpir that they'd developed something similar while each worked at Barclays.

"I don't think it's transformative," Watson said of Apple Pay.

The Apple Watch, on the other hand, "in terms of the work flow you're going to push onto a watch, especially from a complex enterprise ecosystem, it's going to be completely transformative," he said.

A questioner asked if Nike was working with Apple on the watch.

"I can't comment. All I'll say is that we're very, very close to Apple," he said, to laughter.

Watson, who said Nike would "be announcing in the next few months an award-winning partnership with Amazon," said Juniper would help the footwear and apparel company develop its IT infrastructure.

"And we're super excited about it," Watson said. "And that's one of the reasons we chose Juniper over our legacy partner in this space. And we're super excited. I can tell you we're super excited about the relationship we have with Juniper. It is transformal."

Watson, who started at Nike in mid-April, replaced Roland Paanakker, who retired in November after a more than two-decade Nike career starting in 1995.

In an internal email last week to Nike employees, obtained by The Wall Street Journal and others, Nike chief operating officer Eric Sprunk said he would handle the company's IT while Watson's replacement is sought.

"The Tech vision and strategy will be essential to developing and supporting global business needs in many areas," Sprunk said in the memo. "Our commitment to creating this infrastructure remains steadfast, and we will continue to invest in our IT teams and business."